Skills

Multi-Chassis - Rescue Platform

Description: This is the Multi-Chassis Rescue Platform, an easy to assemble and use robot chassis kit. The Multi-Chassis kit provides you with everything you need to give your robot a unique tank tread platform with plenty of room for expansion to add various sensors and controllers. What separates this Multi-Chassis kit from the others is that it is equipped with four tank treads, the two inner treads remain stationary while the outer two can rotate giving your robot the ability to climb low ledges. All you need to do is supply is a basic motor driver and power and you’ll be ready to drive!

This Multi-Chassis Tank Kit includes two 48:1 DC gearboxes with a metal final output gear and shaft and wheel encoders that independently drive each inner 52mm tank treads making this chassis able to drive around tough terrain and climb small steps. The outer tank treads are controlled by a S06NF STD 60° servo which allows the treads to rotate to whatever angle you need them to be in. Each side of the 2.5mm thick aluminum frame, that encloses each gearbox, comes cut with plenty of attachment points (multiple opportunity points) to add a multitude of different robot controllers, drivers, and sensors. The metal frame also has an internal holder available for you to add a servo to your robot to control the outer tank treads.

Note: A building instruction booklet with a complete list of items included is inside this kit and in the documents section below. This comes as a kit but includes all the hardware and tools necessary for assembly.

Customer Comments

I’m in robotics and we used this kit, I recommend the arduino red board, and a 12 volt battery pack converted end to go in the arduinos circular female port, it has a metal rod in center, that will convert the power to what you need to make it run motors good. Also you can to mount the stock battery pack on all frames, its on the holes that are strips running diagonally

This item arrived yesterday, and I’m both pleased and very confused because it arrived pre-assembled but bundled with the tools and instructions for assembly.

Can someone confirm that the kit normally arrives fully assembled? If’s normal, then I definitely recommend updating the description from “…an easy to assemble and use…” to something more like “…a preassembled and easy to modify/use…”. If not, then did I receive a return from another customer, or was it possibly from the product video?

Just a bit of feedback for the product page itself: I’m currently frustrated by the photos for this product, as none of them separate the wires or provide clear documentation of what the connectors look like. Given, I’ve already ordered this product and am just trying to make use of the holiday break by assembling other parts of the robot in anticipation of the kit arriving.

If not for this kit, then at least for ones in the future, it would be extremely useful to always have photos of all the pieces prior to assembly. I notice that the other kits in this product line have such photos, which sadly makes it all the more frustrating that this one does not.

All that said, I’m still looking forward to this kit arriving, and the hopefully successful construction of a 6-8 channel mood-expressing FPV ground robot will occur in the next few weeks!

UPDATE: It only just now occurred to me to see if the video might contain more useful shots by accident (especially where the cables are separated rather than in a knot), and indeed it does! I now see that it specifically has four single-pin female headers for powering the two drive motors, two three-pin female headers for the hall effect sensors (only one for each side… unable to detect direction of rotation), and one three-pin female header for the arm servo. I hope that helps someone else out there looking at this product!

UPDATE: Another comment about the photos is systemic to the website itself: Best I can tell there’s some sort of slideshow logic (at least active in Chrome) that sometimes shifts between the photos when viewing the large versions. This is frustrating both because it hinders my attempts to analyse the photos, but also because I’ve so far failed to figure out how it’s triggered (giving it the feeling of an intermittent bug, rather than a feature). It’s hit me before on a number of product pages, but it’s only now with the related photo-reading problem that the bucket has been tipped. It’s not a huge deal, but I’m hoping that it’s of some help to receive the report/feedback, regardless of whether or not it’s a bug or feature.

Customer Reviews

3 out of 5

OK but marginal power and poor documentation

I knew going in from other reviews that this had poor documentation so I wasn’t completely surprised but it was worse than I thought. The docs are so poor that you really need either some electronics experience or really good search skills to get this working. I’m an experienced EE but wanted to walk my son through figuring it out. It wasn’t possible to find docs with enough detail. Even searching I couldn’t find sufficient docs on the encoders and I just had to tell him how to wire them and use general hall effect sensor docs to explain it.

The worst problem is that the motor/battery pack combination is just barely adequate if it even is. So far we can’t get it to do anything except run on perfectly smooth floors when running off battery. Using an external supply at the same voltage it does better, haven’t experimented too much but it looks like we’ll need higher voltage to get any power. For the price I expected a better matched battery/motor set.

We’re using a Seeedstudio V 1.0 Motor Shield (L298N based) on an Arduino to drive the motors and full drive isn’t adequate. That shield isn’t a good match as the sensor ports aren’t compatible with the sensors from the encoders. I have a couple of high power Chinese motor drivers that we’re going to try next but they don’t mount as well.

The lack of Arduino mounting holes is also annoying but that was discussed in several posts so I knew to expect it. We attached a couple of hard rubber strips to the chassis and the Arudino to the rubber strips. We plan to switch to a Raspberry Pi once basic learning is done.

I think I’m going to end up replacing both the motors and the battery pack. I expected a kit that was usable.

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